THE GUILLOTINE AT WORK. Vol. 2: Twenty Years of Terror in Russia (Data and Documents), Gregory Petrovich Maximoff.

THE GUILLOTINE AT WORK. Vol. 2: Twenty Years of Terror in Russia(Data and Documents), Gregory Petrovich Maximoff. ISBN 978-0-904564-22-8 (347 pages – estimated) First edition published Chicago, 1940, by the Alexander Berkman Fund under the title: The Guillotine At Work: Twenty Years of Terror in Russia (Data and Documents). This, second (revised and corrected) Kindle eBook edition, published in 2013 by ChristieBooks. Cover illustration by the late Flavio Costantini. Jacket design by Simon Stern. (Check out all Kindle editions of ChristieBooks titles) NOW AVAILABLE ON KINDLE — £3.38/€3,91/$5.07 READ INSIDE! ¡LEER EL INTERIOR! (See Vol. 1: The Leninist Counter-Revolution)

A searing indictment of Marxist-Leninist practice and the ‘slaveholding democracy’ that was Soviet Russia from April 12 1918 when the Communist Party* patricians launched their well-prepared and sustained bloody pogrom against anarchists and anarchist and anarcho-syndicalist organisations nationwide; a campaign beside which the deeds of the Tsar’s secret police pale into insignificance. This is a gut-wrenching, anger-inducing account of the blatant, power-led, betrayal of socialist principles and ideals by Lenin, Trotsky, Bukharin, and all the other organisation- and party-building apologists for Marxist-Leninism and ‘democratic centralism’. The next time someone stops you to purchase a copy of Socialist Worker or any other similar title damn their eyes and refer them to this ‘book of destinies’. With a bit of luck the angel Jesrad might be lurking nearby ready to poke out their eyes with a tightly-rolled-up copy of The Big Issue and cast them into the gorge…

Isaac Deutscher’s lecture “On Socialist Man” was given to the second annual Socialist Scholars Conference held at the Hotel Commodore, New York, on September 9-11, 1966. Deutscher had come from London as the principal invited guest at the conference. This reply to Deutscher’s address by Romanian-American anarchist writer Marcus Graham deals, in particular, with the Minutes of the First International and the sabotaging of the Hague Congress by the Marx clique.

Marcus Graham (1893-1985) lived most of his early life in the semi-clandestine world where many fighters for freedom have occasion to find themselves. He contributed to several anarchist papers before launching, in January 1933, MAN!, the organ of the International Group in San Francisco, an important link between different strands of the North American anarchist movement. In its pages Graham published articles covering the whole spectrum of anarchist thought, the politics of Roosevelt’s America, crime, fascism, religion, resistance, art, poetry, literature and anarchist profiles — a real snapshot of life and anarchism throughout most of the Thirties. MAN! continued to be published, despite police and state harassment, until its forced closure by the US government in April 1940.

Anarchist response to Nikolai Bukharin’s ‘Anarchy and Scientific Communism’; a libertarian critique of the proletarian state, the dictatorship of the proletariat, the organisation of production, etc., by two of Bukharin’s anarchist contemporaries. Includes Rocker’s essay ‘Marx and Anarchism’.

This what Lenin’s ‘Golden Boy’ — and, at the time, considered Lenin’s most-likely successor— Nikolai Bukharin, had to say about anarchism . . . That is, until the Marxist-Leninist Golem finally caught up with him in 1938:

Anarchism and Marxism (from a paper given in New York on 6 Nov. 1973 with an introduction by the author for the first English language edition, 1981). First published I981 by Cienfuegos Press Ltd., Over the Water, Sanday, Orkney, KWI7 ZBL, UK.. This Kindle eBook published 2012 by ChristieBooks, PO Box 35, Hastings, East Sussex, TN341ZS. ISBN 978-0-904564-43-3

The main part of my contribution to this Cienfuegos Press pamphlet is a paper which I had occasion to give in New York in 1973, on “Anarchism and Marxism”. But I would like to preface it with a few hitherto unpublished reﬂections on Marx and Engels militant, for it is this aspect of their activities that attracts me most. I must confess that philosophical Marxism, the Marxism which criticises bourgeois political economy, indeed even its historical writings (which are, for me, the most exemplary) nowadays leave me rather cold. On the other hand, I like to follow Marx and Engels in action, fitting into the movement of the labouring masses. I will not discuss here all the militant performances of the two revolutionaries, but only two episodes, chosen from among the most revealing: the editorship of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung in Cologne in 1848-1849, and the impetus given to the First International of 1864-1872.

If I’ve opted for these two major episodes, it’s partly because some recent publications have placed them in a new light. The first is the publication of the articles by Marx and Engels from their journal, the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, in a French translation in 3 volumes (1963-1971). The second, also in French, is the Minutes of the General Council of the First International published in 6 volumes by Progress Publications in Moscow, from 1972 to 1975. The study of these episodes fits into the context of a confrontation between anarchism and Marxism, for they demonstrate at the same time the incontestable value of the two founders of Marxism, and their weak points: authoritarianism, sectarianism, and lack of understanding of the libertarian perspective…. (from the introduction by Daniel Guérin)

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Anarchism

Anarchism swept us away completely, because it demanded everything of us and promised everything to us. There was no remote corner of life that it did not illumine ... or so it seemed to us ... shot though with contradictions, fragmented into varieties and sub-varieties, anarchism demanded, before anything else, harmony between deeds and words
- Victor Serge, Memoirs of a Revolutionary